Comfort Woman (29 page)

Then the faces rippled, merged into one, and the Walker straightened, his head pulling taller and taller the body beneath it, until he towered above me as I huddled in the corner of the carport. “You burn with the fires of hell, daughter!” the Manoa Walker growled in a voice as powerful as my father the preacher's must have been. He marched toward me. “Repent before it is too late and join me. Join your mother.”

I scooted backward. “My mother is dead,” I whispered, a part of me hoping that it was her he was looking for, and that he would leave after he heard the news.

“Jesus was dead!” he yelled. “And he was arisen! So shall your mother and all who have been bathed in the blessed blood of Christ. Whosoever lives and believes will never die, but be Born Again unto the Kingdom of God!”

“No,” I said. “My mother was not Christian. She was ...” I stood slowly, my back to the wall, keeping a wary eye on the Walker, trying to find a word to encompass my mother's beliefs. “She was, uh, Korean,” I blurted.

“She is a lamb in God's flock,” said the Manoa Walker, “and I've come to collect the one stray. Do not forsake me. Do not deny me.” When he took a step closer toward me, I shot my hand out in warning. The palm of my hand, meant to halt just shy of his chest, brushed it so slightly that the flannel of his shirt felt like air on my fingertips. Blue fire crackled between us, and the Walker fell back as if he had been shot. He dropped to the ground, clutching his chest. He curled, forehead to knee, a cooked shrimp shriveling into a C.

And when he stood again, shoulders hunched, with eyes that scuttled in brown and blurry confusion, his head reached only to my shoulder. “Get mac salad wit' the KC special?” he asked, and then he looked at his sleeping bag, at my oil-spotted carport, at me. “Oh no, it happened again, see it happened. Blue light, spaceship, aliens, microprobed.” He rambled on, muttering as he scrambled to collect his belongings. “Abductions.
Enquirer
wants to know.” He gathered his belongings into his arms and ran down the driveway, scattering several brochures for credit cards and savings accounts along the way.

I sat in the driveway for a while after he left, nursing my hand, which tingled as if I had plunged it into ice water and was just getting the feeling back. My fingers still hummed as I entered the house. I shook my hand, but instead of dissipating, the tingling grew, vibrating through my arms, my shoulders, into my chest.

When the tingling moved into my head, I closed my eyes and almost dropped to the ground. I knelt in the entryway, feeling the floorboards rattling beneath me. Finally the floor settled, and I opened my eyes, to find the colors in my mother's home shimmering, outlining for me what needed to be done. First I fed and watered the spirits, who grew restless in their hunger. I refilled the offering bowls, placing water and some oranges found in the refrigerator on the kitchen windowsill for the Seven Sisters. For Saja, I set out dried cuttlefish—the only meat I could find—on the steps leading away from our house.

I roamed the rooms, as if on a guiderail, checking on each of the talismans my mother had set up, making sure each was secure in its position. Only one, the red-bordered charm my mother glued to the television to counteract negative incoming energy, needed to be restuck. And then the frogs called to me, until—like my mother before me—I moved them from room to room, rotating the ones hiding behind books on shelves, or on the back of the toilet next to the extra rolls of paper, to the bedroom and kitchen so that they got their share of light.

I performed the actions of my mother, caring for the spirits of the house, in order to feel my mother once again. I wanted to be able to feel her next to me, to sense her spirit—for if there really are such things, I knew she would come to me, feeling my need for her, in death as she rarely did in life.

“Mom,” I called. “It's me. Beccah.” I waited, closing my eyes, stretching my arms wide, waiting for her hug. I would have taken the slightest breeze brushing against my wrist or inner elbow, the slightest rustling of one of the talismans, I would have taken anything, as a sign. I held my arms out until I felt them burn, then dropped them. “Mom,” I called out once more. Eyes still closed, I rose and moved through the room. “Are you here?”

After bumping and tripping my way into her bedroom, I gave up and opened my eyes. I walked over to her bureau, where she kept a small altar for the Birth Grandmother, the most intimate of her spirits. The water in one offering dish had evaporated, leaving a faint line at the rim, and the rice in the other dish—as if feeding on its neighbor—had started to dissolve, melting down into a watery gruel. I dipped a finger into the empty water dish, then touched my tongue. I tasted only myself.

Next to the Birth Grandmother's offerings, my mother kept a jewelry box. Made out of rosewood, inlaid with ox horn and mother-of-pearl, guarded by a lock in the shape of a fish, the box held my mother's treasures. I knew what I would find when I opened the box with the key that never left the fish-lock's mouth: frog pins and pendants and earrings given to her by her regular customers, assorted buttons, the gold and jade hoops that she sewed on my clothes for protection, her wedding band, a baby tooth, my umbilical cord, school pictures and report cards, her jade frog.

I rubbed the frog against my cheek and remembered that on the night Reno gave her the necklace, my mother turned toward me just as we were drifting off to sleep. She slipped the chain off her neck and dangled it above my face, so that with each twist of the chain, the little frog kicked the tip of my nose. “Little Frog,” my mother said, “I have a story for you.

“Once on a time, there was a little frog who never listened to its mother. If the mother said go north, her child went south. If the mother said go to the river, her child would run away into the mountains.” My mother bounced her jade frog up the bridge of my nose and rested it on my forehead, making me giggle.

“Am I the Little Frog, Mommy?” I said, both hopeful and worried that I might be. “That's not me, huh, Mommy, is it?”

My mother hopped the frog over my mouth. “This is how it was between them, from the time the child was born till the time came for the old mother to die. ‘My child,' the mother frog said, ‘When I die, bury me by the river. Do not, absolutely do not, bury me on the mountain.' Of course, knowing the little frog, the mother frog fully expected to be buried on the mountain.”

I opened my mouth, pushed the frog away with my tongue. “What do you want, Mommy? What do you want me to do?” I said. “Ask me and I'll do it. Okay? Just tell me.”

The frog caressed my face. “When the mother frog died,” my mother continued, “the little frog was so sad it made up its mind that this time it would do as its mother wished. He buried her at the mouth of the river, and each time it rained, he hopped to her grave, croaking and crying to heaven, worried that the river would wash up her corpse and carry it away.”

That night, and perhaps the night after, I dreamed of frog angels that swooped from the sky like the monkey bats in
The Wizard of Oz.
As my mother and I floated on a river that looked like a purified Ala Wai, the frog angels plucked my mother from the water and carried her into the sky. I watched my mother—a tiny light against their darkness—beat against the frog angels' sticky-toed talons and flapping wings as they flew higher and higher. I watched and I cried, not knowing how to help, left behind on the banks of the river.

Now I wonder if I had been remembering the wrong story, if every time my mother said, “Remember the toad,” she meant, “Remember the frog.” And I wonder if that changes anything. I find myself second-guessing my interpretations of her stories, and wonder, now that she is dead, how I should remember her life.

I slapped the lock on the box, snapping the hinge, and unearthed something unexpected under the tangle of jewelry: a cassette tape marked “Beccah.”

I remember that occasionally one of my mother's clients, new from Korea, would pay her to perform a blessing or an exorcism for the family ghosts left behind. My mother would ask Reno to tape the ceremony, capturing the voices of the spirits as they spoke through her. And when the trance came to an end after two hours or two weeks or however long it took for the unhappy ancestors to relay their grievances, my mother would wrap and pack the cassettes for mailing to their relatives still living in Korea. When I first saw these packages, I remember thinking they were gifts for me and was disappointed when, after my persistent needling, my mother opened one.

“See, Beccah-chan,” my mother said after I had ripped the paper off a small package and found a black cassette tape. “This one's not for you.”

“Oh,” I said, but, unwilling to give up, asked her to play it. “Is it music? I wanna hear, I wanna hear!”

My mother slipped the cassette into our tape recorder. After a prelude of whirs and scratching, my mother's voice—accompanied by a beating drum—waited out of the recorder.

“Yaaak!” I shoved my hands against my ears. “What are you doing, Mommy?”

My mother slapped down my hands. “You should listen, learn,” she said. “This will be you one day.”

“Not!” I yelled. “No way. I'm not going to scream like that for nothing.”

“Not for nothing,” my mother said. “I am crying for the dead. To show proper respect. To show love.”

We listened to my mother's cries and moans, to the heartbeat of the drum, until the tape wound down. I knew that as a fortune-teller and spirit medium, she was paid to console or cajole the dead. Sometimes customers, mostly the new immigrants from Korea, paid her to perform ceremonies for lost family members and the dead that had been left behind. They would record my mother's chants to send to relatives and neighbors back home.

There's a possibility I saw this tape, my tape, among the others, or I might have heard her making the actual recording. I would have assumed that this tape was for one of her customers, someone who had failed to pay for or pick up the merchandise. Never would I have thought that my mother performed the ceremony for herself. Never, as a child, did I think about whom my mother had had to leave behind, and whom she cried for.

Instead, when we finished listening to her customer's tape, I told my mother, “I would cry for you, Mommy.”

“I know,” she answered. “Every year, on my death anniversary, that will be your gift to me.”